On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 11:13 AM, Robert Citek <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Scott Granneman <[email protected]> wrote: >> And did you see what Facebook & Microsoft announced yesterday? Whoa. >> That's got the potential to be HUGE and drive many many more users to >> the cloud. > > Possibly, which is what FB and MS are hoping for. > > In full disclosure, I'm not a big FB fan. I use it because for some > things it is useful. But I actually find it a bit of a disorganized > mess. For example, there's no obvious way to filter, search, tag, or > organize posts as it's not really a blog and not accessible via any > search engine. Now they've added Docs. For me that's not even a > little plus. I currently have in excess of 100+ documents (ods, doc, > xls, odt, ppt, opp, etc.) locally. I'm trying to imagine what having > 100+ documents on Facebook would look like. Yes, it's huge -- a huge > mess.
Actually - as I understand it, which sure could be wrong - the docs are ACTUALLY stored on Microsoft's SkyDrive, which is a pretty nice cloud-based storage site, with folders, etc. So they'd actually be there, and you'd share the docs with people on Facebook to distribute them for collaboration. But again, I could be wrong - but I think I'm right. That surely helps alleviate a lot of the mess. >> You can keep fighting the battles of the past, or you can figure out >> how to embrace the future & make it as good as possible. > > The problem with the future is that it isn't evenly distributed. Very true! > The > future is a small niche for the early adopters. There is a huge > segment of the populace that isn't there, yet. There are still a lot > of dinosaurs, e.g. buying/selling a house is still mostly done with > physical paper. But that will change, as so much already has. 10 years ago, would we be facing the collapse of the newspaper industry? & now the thought that news is going to be online primarily is no big deal to most users. Same thing for books, etc. > As for reading and creating ODF files, OOo is just one of many > options. If you can't open it with MS Office and can't install OOo, > then go the cloud route with Google docs, which reads/writes ODF, MS > Office, RTF, HTML, and text. So there really isn't a need for an ODF > plug-in for MS Office. If Oracle can get away with charging $90 for > it, good for them. If the plug-in dies a market death, no big loss. $90 seems quite excessive & greedy to me, so I hope it dies. > BTW, I don't see the future as all in the cloud. We've been there > before with mainframes, where all the computation and data was > "somewhere else." Then came the PCs. And people really like the idea > of being able to do things quickly and having control over their own > data, locally. Then came the Internet followed by cloud services. > Now we are going back to the model of computation and data being > "somewhere else." That's fine and dandy until you realize that you > don't have as much control as you might like and you don't always have > that network connection. I suspect the future will be some > combination: parts in the cloud (or likely, different clouds) and > parts on my local device (or likely, different devices). And when the > data is local, I'll need to have that dinosaur app to work with the > data. I don't think it will TOTALLY be in the cloud (but who knows?), but a lot will definitely be there. Now we have the Internet, which we didn't have before, & we're getting closer all the time to ubiquitous access. Apple's recent deal with AT&T re: iPad 3G access is a harbinger of that. As for control, close to 100% of my students have their email in the cloud, & they could care less about control, because they have something far more important to them: access. In fact, WU is moving ALL students over to Microsoft's hosted email this year (which sucks, but oh well). Remember the old adage that when given a choice between security and convenience, people pick convenience every time? When given a choice between control and access, they pick access, almost every time. Scott -- R. Scott Granneman [email protected] ~ www.granneman.com ~ granneman.tel Full list of publications @ http://www.granneman.com/publications My new book: Google Apps Deciphered @ http://www.granneman.com/books "When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl." ---Anonymous -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug
